Blogs

If you spend a bit of time surfing the Web, you’ve probably come across the word “blog” on a few occasions. You may have wondered what a blog is, as well as if and why you should use one. This article will try to answer these questions by explaining what a blog is and listing some of its advantages.

OSWA

Most likely, OSWA isn’t a term you hear every day and contrary to what some may think, it is neither the name of a dog nor a city in Finland. If you do quick Internet search, you will find that it can refer to various organizations ranging from the Oregon Small Woodlands Associate to the Old School Wrestling Alliance. However, if you’re receiving this e-mail, odds are that another OSWA will be of more interest to you and it stands for Open Source Web Applications.

Open source software is all around us. It takes many forms and spans numerous categories. It is currently used by companies, individuals, non-profit organizations and even governments. As a matter of fact, it is so popular that there are literally hundreds of thousands of popular open source packages. These are highly impressive numbers, and they are worth thinking about. This article will briefly cover the origins of open source, what it is, why it is used, and provide examples of OSWA.

Writing for the Web and for Newsletters

It’s no secret that some Web sites are a lot more effective and generate a lot more interest than others. While some sites get millions of regular visitors every day, others are hardly ever stumbled upon and are quickly overlooked when they do get visited. Interestingly enough, many of the sites that fail to generate interest do have interesting content, but it’s simply not written and presented in a user friendly manner. The way the content of your site is written will play a major role in its success.

Similarly, although newsletters may be extremely beneficial to your company, they can also have adverse effects if you are not careful about the way you deliver content.

Yes, I have Adobe!

Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader and PDFs have been with us for more than 10 years now. To date, more than 500 million copies of Adobe Reader have been distributed worldwide on 23 platforms and 26 languages. Of course we still get people telling us: “I have Adobe!” which of course leads to a discussion about Adobe Systems, Acrobat and PDFs. Usually that person has the free Adobe Reader installed on their PC or Mac. Their knowledge of what the Reader does can be summarized by viewing and printing PDFs they get as e-mail attachments or when surfing the Web.

The common assumption is that since the Adobe Reader is free it is therefore quite limited. So, if you really want to do great things with PDFs you need the full version of Adobe Acrobat. The answer is yes and no. Adobe has done a great deal over the years to develop Adobe Acrobat into the most complete set of tools for creating and editing PDF files. What is not commonly known is the free Reader has also had countless features added, some which are hidden! PDF document authors certainly need Adobe Acrobat, but now these authors can enable Adobe Reader users to do much more with the PDFs they receive.

If you use Internet Explorer, you may recently have noticed some strange and mysterious rectangle outlines surrounding many Web browser components such as Flash, Quicktime, and Media Player movies. Upon attempting to interact with these components, a message appears saying that you must click to activate and use the control. When you do so, the outline disappears and the functionality of the component returns to normal. You probably noticed these outlines on some of your favorite Websites, but perhaps they even appeared on your own site. You may possibly still wonder why these outlines are there, what they are for, and if you can do anything about them.

Situating the Current Popular eLearning Offering

When one decides to venture into the world of eLearning, he or she will quickly come across the following terms:

Learning object: a pre-defined parcel of learning that elaborates on a subject or a notion. It is usually developed with rich multimedia.

Learning Content Management System (LCMS): a system that enables the organization and sequencing of learning objects to follow a preset learning path.

Learning Management Systems (LMS): a system that manages individual learning paths and tracks the learner’s participation and results. It usually interacts with an LCMS and many systems today integrate both.